ESa and chemotherapy treatment for rheumatoid arthritis

I wonder if anyone can help me out with a query - a client of ours is in receipt of ESA and been placed in the WRAG. However he is in receipt of DLA high rate care and mobility and receiving weekly intravenous chemotherapy - not for the treatment of cancer but for rheumatoid arthritis.
As i wasnt aware that chemo could be used for this I was wondering if this use of chemotherapy would mean that he could be placed automatically in the support group rather than the work group or if that just covered chemotherapy for cancer patients?

thanks

There is nothing in regulation 35 of the Employment and Support Allowance Regulations (certain claimants to be treated as having limited capability for work related activity) that refers to cancer, so I cannot see a problem with your client being put in the support group

hi

Thank you for that

jane

Out of interest is the ‘Chemotheraphy ’ treatment you refer to Methotrexate if so you probably need to get something from the specialist medical information. Most people are aware of methotrexate as a cancer therapy but it isalso now a drug of choice for RA and has some major side effects which you can consider but also does have a very good treatment record

Chemotherapy basically means “treatment with drugs (or at least chemical agents, which is all drugs are),  as opposed to radiotherapy, physiotherapy, occupational therapy, psychotherapy etc etc. Unless you restrict its meaning to the use of drugs in dealing with cancers and (possibly) benign tumours, I don’t know how you draw a line between using methotrexate in RA and using, say, diclofenac sodium in osteoarthritis. Both are disease-modifying (as opposed to say paracetomol or morphine, which simply treat the symptom of pain).
Methotrexate is a seriously nasty drug wth unpleasant side effects, but then so are the biphosphonates that are used for treating osteoporosis (and may be adminstered intravenously), and lots of other things. I don’t know what the answer is but I am not persuaded that this was ever intended to cover anything but cancer treatment.

It may well not have been the intention to apply other than to chemotherapy for cancers but it doesn’t say so. The important point is the method by which treatment is given/received. It is only if chemotherapy is intravevenous, intraperitoneal or intracathecal that the regulations can apply. My knowledge is fairly slim, but I understood methotrexate for RA is not usually administered by any of the above three methods - most people I have come across take a weekly dose orally - so this won’t help people who take methotrexate in general.